“Primary Structures,” Turns 60

On April 28, 1966, The New York Times ran a review of the Jewish Museum’s “Primary Structures” exhibition by Hilton Kramer, a conservative critic notorious for his disdain for contemporary art. That contempt was amply displayed in his views on the show: “Here are 42 American and British artists,” Kramer observed, “who care nothing for the personal touch, the subjective inflection, the private vocabulary—the whole panoply of individual expressive devices that have yielded modern painting and sculpture some of their most glorious achievements.”

Instead, he continued, their work demonstrated “an air of extreme detachment, of theory condescending to realize itself in the concrete specifications of a particular object.” Still, he understood that the exhibition, organized by legendary curator Kynaston McShine, represented the “first comprehensive glimpse of a style that promises—or perhaps one should say threatens—to become our period style. We are going to see a good many more of these ‘Primary Structures’ before the nineteen-sixties have come to an end.”

And so it came to pass, as “Primary Structures” offered the ur-survey of what would be called Minimalism—a name eventually hated by many of the artists to whom it was applied. Minimalism impacted not only art, but also architecture, fashion, design, and just about everything else. The term became a veritable synonym for a thing or idea that was reductive in nature, and it continues to shape culture today. With the 60th anniversary of “Primary Structures” approaching, it’s worth looking back at the show and the mid-century art world that birthed it.

That world was much smaller than it is now, and the belief—since challenged by recent shows like Whitechapel Gallery’s “Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015” (2015), Tate’s “The World Goes Pop” (2015–16), the Met’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” (2021–22), and even the Jewish Museum’s own reworking of “Primary Structures” in 2014—still held that innovative art, generally suffixed with “-ism,” was conditioned on a particular place (Paris during the 19th century, New York during the 20th). Likewise, the concomitant avant-garde narrative that art history was driven by a succession of cutting-edge styles, with each supplanting its predecessor, was still honored. Since many interpreted this arc to mean a progressive shedding of detail, or evidence of the artist’s hand, Minimalism seemed like a logical culmination of modernism.

“Primary Structures” included a roster of then little-known names who, per Kramer’s prediction, became a who’s who of 1960s art: the Americans Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Robert Smithson, and Judy Chicago; and British participants including Philip King, Michael Bolus, and David Annesley.

As the organizer of the show, however, McShine never used the word Minimalism, which, like so many labels in art history, was coined after the fact as a one-size-fits-all descriptor for a range of differing approaches. In fact, he studiously avoided categorizing the work, letting it speak for itself.

One thing the artists of “Primary Structures” did share was an historical debt to the early-Modern and postwar practitioners of geometric abstraction. Kramer himself noted connections to Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, but he might have added the AbEx-adjacent likes of Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman.

Still, these earlier artists differed significantly from the participants in “Primary Structures” in their intentions. Malevich and Mondrian saw painting as a spiritual platform, purged of all but its most essential elements. Newman’s vast color fields were meant to overwhelm viewers with a sublime sensory overload. Reinhardt’s “Black Paintings” were probably closest to Minimalism, though in fact he viewed them as a form of liberation from the yoke of art history.

By contrast, many of the artists in “Primary Structures” pushed formalism to a state of totalizing neutrality, most conspicuously in the concept of the “specific object” developed by Donald Judd in his 1964 essay of the same name. Basically, Judd rejected any kind of referential role for a work of art, insisting that its “meaning” lay strictly in its autonomous occupation of three-dimensional space—a thing to be apprehended all at once rather than as a composition of parts. This meant an absolute renunciation of painting for being illusionistic, no matter the type. “Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface,” he wrote, putting paid to an entire medium, though that hardly stopped anyone from wanting to pursue it.

Judd had his work fabricated by others, something that particularly rankled Kramer. But this methodology spoke to a uniquely American, can-do sensibility based on the hardware store and factory floor (Judd’s work was often serial in nature), as well as on an absenting of history.

McShine wasn’t nearly as militant in his thinking. He included artists like the Brit Anthony Caro, whose sculptures constituted a form of pictorialism made concrete, an expression derived from David Smith, a sculptor whose formative work was influenced by Picasso. Along with Judd precursor Tony Smith, McShine positioned Caro as a pillar of the exhibition and its themes.

“Primary Structures” was immediately recognized for its break with convention, especially in the way it suggested a shift in the artist’s role from maker to designer. Indeed, Judd wasn’t alone in having his work fabricated by others, and it remains a standard procedure in contemporary art.

For all of Judd’s talk about the deficiencies of painting, though, much of the work in the show—including his own—packed a graphic punch that was usually native to 2D imagery. Many of the artists on view employed a “free-wheeling use of color,” as Kramer put it, as well as planar shapes that would feel at home on canvas.

Ultimately “Primary Structures” was inseparable from its venue, as the Jewish Museum was one of the prime movers of contemporary art at a time when its program included the first retrospectives of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Though this phase in the museum’s existence was brief, it spoke to an era when ideas in art still counted, no matter the pushback. Even Kramer had to concede that the show “conclusively demonstrates the flourishing existence of an entirely new sculptural esthetics.”